Azure Networking Senior Programme Manager Amir Dahan said the attack was carried out using a botnet of approximately 70,000 bots primarily located across the Asia-Pacific region, such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and China, as well as the United States. Dahan identified the target of the attack only as "an Azure customer in Europe".

The Microsoft exec said the record-breaking DDoS attack came in three short waves, in the span of ten minutes, with the first at 2.4 Tbps, the second at 0.55 Tbps, and the third at 1.7 Tbps.

Dahan said Microsoft successfully mitigated the attack without Azure crashing. Prior to Microsoft's disclosure today, the previous DDoS record was held by a 2.3 Tbps attack that Amazon's AWS division mitigated in February 2020.